The Loire Valley is known internationally for its many castles and its wines… But it is also the French region where we find the largest network of underground galleries in Europe with more than 1,000 km of galleries, the distance between Marseille and London.
Why here and not elsewhere? Well because ofa shelly limestone rock deposited there by the sea a long time ago and called “the falun”. This falun was extracted from the fields where the peasants dug huge extraction galleries to be used as sand or as building stone.
Unlike the traditional troglodyte villages dug into the cliffs, such as that of Meschers sur Gironde in Charente Maritime, Rochemenier, 24 km from Saumur, is made up of houses dug in flat ground.
On the surface everything is normal, pretty houses in tufa stone, a typical rock of the Loire Valley. Moreover, its immaculate color gave its name to the region… White Anjou.
But the unusual comes from the basement with mazes of galleries 7m below the ground… It’s a real Swiss cheese.
There are altogether 40 cave farms and 250 excavated rooms. Here, the farm yard has been dug out, clearing the most friable soil and falun. A kind of cliff was then born in which all the living rooms and outbuildings were designed and there was no need to build frames since the earth above served as a roof and a garden at the same time.
The funniest thing is to see all the flues of chimneys which emerge at ground levelin the middle of the gardens.
Many galleries are still operated today by mushroom farms where the famous Paris mushrooms are cultivated…. an Angevine specialty, the galipette.